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Georgia talks with marketing consultant Bryce Whitwam and takes us in and out and further in – maybe further in than any of us have ever wanted to go – to the TikTok shop; Mike talks with media studies professor Shannon Mattern about Drafts – writing while it is still in progress – and how it feels to POST them. Also: Audience participation!
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Find the slides for this live performance on our website.
Intro Links
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The Shop Zone
More of Bryce Whitwam:
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Writing is Death
Find Shannon Mattern:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
It’s slow writing
on re-admission of the abyss
so if this body is sleepy-tired
please walk around
Suddenly there’s nothing
in the laws of the alphabet
that breaks open revealing
what buoyancy am I.
Excerpt of Puberty of Puck, by Mark Hyatt
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
Hans talks with Lia Haberman of the newsletter ICYMI about the ostensible death of the hashtag; Georgia talks with media scholar Whitney Phillips about catching breaking news via internet memes. Also: Hit Em!
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Intro Links
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#DeathoftheHashtag
Find Lia:
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Meming the News, Newsing the Memes
Find Whitney:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos
left in matter – a little bit of not-yet in everything that was –
so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions–
the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid–
was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope,
leaving things unfinished?
as if in completing a sentence there was death–
– Excerpt of Ars Poetica (the idea) by Dana Levin
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
We respond to your comments!
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☎️ Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voice mail
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📧 Email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com
🌐 Leave a comment at neverpo.st
See what interstitials we need submissions for, like: SEND US YOUR DRAFTS
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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta.
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.
Contributing producer Victoria Dominguez attempts to understand the practice of digitally resurrecting deceased loved ones using artificial intelligence. Also: home movies.
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Intro Links
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BRB AI Links
Find Tori:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
One winter, he held a rope, lowered me
by the ankles to the wells bottom.
I ascended upside-down through the dark thermometer
with a blood orange in my teeth. He had a beard
of new snow. I held cold to his pant leg
while our dog left and snapped at a sound
in the air only he could hear. When I fell
in love, he reached out to me and held me down
when she slinked away on our dirt road alone,
sheepish, depress. He held me as the constellations
mingled through the torn curtain.
– Excerpt of My Pietá by Thomas Heise
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
Mike chats with EX Research about their new report which goes deep on Roblox, the massively multiplayer online game played by HALF of all American teenagers. Georgia takes a look at Love Island UK – as many people have over the last few weeks – and asks why so much of that looking is preoccupied with plastic surgery. Also: the sound of touching grass.
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Intro Links
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Once Day, We’ll All Be In There
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Love Island Face
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
What can I tell you? It was a summer that seemed to be
making history — their personal history — almost before
it began, and they stood back slightly, still in it, but
observing it, saying “the summer this,” “the summer that,”
all the while it was going on. They became obsessed with
a fountain, for example, one they walked past each day,
how abundantly it would reach upwards and yet be pouring
back down itself the whole time — all winter this fountain
had been dry, not saying a word. What more can I tell you?
Oh, everything…
Excerpt of No Name by Emily Berry
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
Mike talks with unsung internet pillar DylanPDX, steward of vxTwitter and others, who single-handedly does what Big Social doesn’t want - keeping your embeds working. Senior producer Hans gets the ambrosia from Tallulah Trezevant, an antiquities scholar who ran an experiment to see how fast she would get flushed down the alt-right pipeline when expressing an interest in ancient history online. Also! Some of your favorite hidden corners of the internet.
Show Notes:
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Intro Links
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vxTwitter with Dylan
Find Dylan:
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Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline, with Tallulah Trezevant
Find Tallulah:
Other Sources of hope in Antiquity:
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Favorite Corners of the Internet
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Excerpt of “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
An episode-long staff round-table about music library management with special guest Meghal Janardan.
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
We respond to you!
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LINKS!
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Moss’ Email
Hi Never Post!
My name is Moss (she/her) and I am trans.
Your recent segment on before and after pics got me thinking about the particular variety of before and afters that are shared online in the trans community. I think that this became a lot more visible to me after being witness to the early chaos of unconstrained trans horniness and wild openness in the early formation of Bluesky last year, which is a whole fascinating bit of platform ecosystem history, especially seeing how much Bluesky has leveled out into something much more "presentable" and twitter-like now that it's operating at scale—but I digress.
On sites like Twitter and Bluesky (and surely elsewhere...) there is an established trend of trans beings (queer beings) sharing before and after pictures of themselves. These are occasioned by trans holidays, like Transgender Day of Visibility, by personal events like transition anniversaries, and by quote chains of such pics (not to mention special occasions of steps taken towards transition). I think it's important to mention these not only as a queer phenomenon, but as something that illuminates how before and afters work for everyone in a variety of situations (as is the case with many things related to transness—it's not [only] about being trans: it's about living more freely). The trans case highlights a few aspects that I want to explore here:
1) The pics, by virtue of being in a trans discourse, would seem to point to something deeper about how life is structured—an identity, a gender—rather than merely an aspect of life—weight, appearance, dwelling, &c.—not of course that identity and gender are not merely aspects of life nor that what seem to be mere aspects are not structuring, but thinking about the weight these are given culturally. What does it mean to see one photo and then another and think, and be encouraged to think by the poster, to see the second as more in line with their gender, as "more woman," "more animal," "more thing," "more man," "more..."? But perhaps above all "MORE THEMSELF." I think we can reasonably be quite ambivalent about this: as your segment points out, the after of the before and after is actually a changing state, and that perhaps it's harmful to over-fix (and that it might fix norms that should be taken as fluid and contextual), but, on the other hand, the fixing function of the before and after photo may be precisely the point for the trans poster—a trans performance to reinforce self. We might further ask, what is visible and what is invisible about transition—does the before and after pic over-reinforce the visible (and how does it then interact with the endless discourse of "passing")? There is also of course a great potential for rupture with norms with queer people—the after often completely rejects standard norms (but then is it rejection or creation...? and so on and so on and so on).
2) The before pic is possibly quite contentious for trans beings, when it is understood to be a pre-transition pic (and not say, both before and after being after the start of transition). This is because there are a ton of frameworks for understanding what one was before transition, and—rightfully—everyone has a different approach: Shall I define myself in opposition to my past? Shall I cut the past off and build myself in the now? Should my transition be understood as an attempt to work with my past, to heal my past, and to continue what is good from it? Is transition not at all a dividing line between me and my past—is it simply an event in a continuous life? Is transition not an event but a continuous process that has been operating since the very moment of my birth? (How many of these are at play at once!?) This makes understanding what is conveyed by the after very difficult. There's a sense in which the before and after flattens all these possibilities into the idea of CONTRAST, of cutting off, of opposition, without precisely exploring what kind of contrast is meant, or whether it is meant at all. There's also a tendency that I've noticed in the commentary (from both the original poster and commenters) on these posts to read them in terms of well-known transition narratives, where before the being was miserable, and after the being is happy and thriving. There's kind of an assertion that this is somehow visible in the picture—that a moment of photography can capture years of pain, years of pleasure—when, of course, life is so complicated, so variegated, even when transition does mark a huge change for the better (and it really does).
3) There is a pretty complicated interaction between the before and after pic and the values of the audience, when the audience is trans (I could also talk about the beings trying to figure out whether they should transition, but I don't want to make this too long). If I come across a before and after pic displaying a change in weight, I might (will) have a complicated emotional reaction, but I myself may not have committed to changing that aspect of myself, and there's a sense that a weight before and after is aimed at a pretty broad swath of the poster's community. But if I come across a before and after transition pic, not only does the pic feel in some sense aimed at me as a member of the trans community, but I in fact have as a trans being already accepted the underlying goals and values of this by committing myself to transitioning—it is something that I myself am trying to accomplish (but of course, not necessarily by the same methods as the being in the pics, and not the same goals). This is not to say that this kind of in-community targeting of before and after pics is unique to the trans community—think for example of before and afters shared in a weight-loss subreddit vs. ones that show up from a friend on your general feed. However, there's a kind of weird way in which being connected to trans people on social media, just as your friends and peers, puts one into a community rather than general discourse.
In any case, I think I have rambled enough—it's a big can of worm spaghetti. Hopefully there's enough wiggle room and questioning here that all beings might find a place to be nurtured from it. Thank you all for your wonderful work on this enjoyable podcast, and thank you for encouraging community input. Keep it up!
Moss
Georgia chats with Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Hilke Schellmann about the job market, and the increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence in hiring. Mike talks with comedian, writer and podcast host Jamie Loftus about her show Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), and the curse of becoming an Internet Main Character. Also! Every YouTube video the team watched in the last two weeks.
Show Notes:
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Intro Links
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Why Is It (Hiring) Like This? with Hilke Schellmann
Find Hilke:
Other Sources:
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Main Characters, with Jamie Loftus
Find Jamie:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
Others were more economical than I, but I
had my red marble. I had action
figures weighing down the drapes
on tiny threads. That twisted, and got smaller.
One door led
to a more economical room
Perhaps a more economical view. The girl
across the hall was the same girl
Except, “Persuasion” by Joyelle McSweeney
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
Georgia digs deep into the enshittification of dating apps, and pays dearly as a result. Mike talks to Aftermath co-founder Luke Plunkett about recent, massive changes to Google’s Page Rank algorithm, and the risk of reconfiguring entire industries to pander to search traffic. And also: An AI Voice Clone of Mike is set to *maximum chaos*.
Show Notes:
Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/
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Intro Links
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Dating Apps (derogatory)
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Google Scruples
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
Foot, how you press
me to keep that
old contact alive
the repeated daily sentiment
of pace so
grim, always that
untrusting silence
untitled, by JH Prynne, from The White Stones
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
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